I don't get the plasm hype aside from the gee wiz factor because someone actually dropped all that cash for one.
If you need a thin TV go with LCD or DLP. Plasmas are heavy as hell, typically have lower resolution, and they burn in (I've heard that this is a myth, and I've heard that its true).
I've got a 46" HDTV RPTV, and the picture is amazing. It has better resolution than both models of these Dells.
FWIW, "a device that is very useful for a particular job" is not an adequate definition of a gadget. Gadgets, in my opinion, are not by definition useful, but rather a small manmade gizmo that is a novelty. It may or may not be that useful. How useful are many of the items on the list today?
All in all, we'll be able to do less with our current (i.e., digital) equipment than we could do with equivalent equipment (i.e., the VCR) 30 years ago.
Gotta call you out on this one. Even if my 30 year old VCR had better picture and sound quality than my cable provided DVR, I would use the DVR. Why?
1) it labels the recordings for me 2) search forward/reverse is better 3) no tapes 4) recording a particular program is trivial 5) recording a particular program _every time it comes on_ is trivial
When I was a kid, I was the only person in the household that could program the VCR to record something, and even then I rarely did it.
Now, I record stuff for the hell of it.
What I wish the DVR had (that the VCR doesn't either) is I wish the firewire port was worth using. By that, I wish I could suck any recorded program off of the device onto my computer at something near firewire speeds. I was excited about the firewire port at first, but then I realized that it only spit out the currently viewed program in realtime and that it might be encrypted. Well, needless to say, I never wasted my time buying a firewire cable for it. I mean if I could "cron" my DVR to play something at a particular time and have my computer capture it at that time, I would not mind terribly much, but I am not going to sit and wait to record something in realtime, especially since I do not know if its going to be encrypted or not.
For most content, I could care about archiving it for personal use. Most everything on TV is rebroadcasted so many times that its nearly impossible to miss something. However, there are some programs I would like to have archived. I guess I'll start using those TV torrent sites for those. Hell, I already pay my cable company for my internet and cable, why should they care where I get recordings of their programming?
Why do advertisers/companies think that annoying the hell out of people is a good way to make money?????
Being that "people" are not the customers of advertisers or companies that are paid via advertising, I guess that annoying people is immaterial to their business.
It's really annoying when you have two different java ads playing some sound. But here you are trying to read a page, and unless you turn your speakers off or something, you have an engine or something running.
Hmm, is there some compelling reason that you enable java and flash in order to see ads?
I find it a much better browsing experience to browse by default w/o java or plugins. No annoying flash ads or java ads, and when I come up on a web page that is blank (usually a flash only site), I either leave, enable plugins temporarily, or use another browser temporarily. Actually, its probably closest to 50% immediately leave, 25% for the other two options if I'm morbidly curious. Then, its still 50/50 if I stay or go. Usually the eyecandy and annoying wait times for the flash to load and the repetitive sounds and music drive me off.
I will say this to the end of time. If your website requires some 3rd party plugin that is necessary to view that website, your website is broken and should be distributed on CD via snailmail or something if you want me to run an application.
Currently, its _only_ the flash plugin that seems most "required" to view browser applications, but just wait until the resurgence of the plugin craze where every website requires a special 3rd party plugin to view their site. To me its a slippery slope that I would not care to go down again.
"It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax."
So that is why there are all of those cigarettes thrown on the side of the roads from Ohio and Indiana into Michigan.
Seriously, cigarette taxes are a scam and its common to buy them from a neighboring city or state to pay fewer taxes. Its at least 50c a pack cheaper to not buy them from the city I live in.
I, too, would like to see a more involved, academic analysis of the security of each platform. But even as a quick quantitative analysis, this technique for deciding how secure a system is falls on its face.
Isn't the post hoc data from the past 10 years sufficient?
If I said the President of the United States taught me that solving problems with violence was appropriate, which is why I shot my next door neighbor, I'd be called a lunatic. But if I say video games made me do it, I'm just a victim?
Violence in video games are not real. The violence that the President of the United States does on a daily basis is.
So yeah, your a lunatic if you think that President has anything to do with citizen's violent behavior instead of video games.
Some countries make the person that initiated the lawsuit pay the person they are suing's legal expenses if they loose. Kinda ups the ante now doesn't it?
1. Questionable Parenting. 2. Culture of violence. 3. Easy access to high level weapons.
It probably has some to do with all three. But if anyone growing up and watching the standard news programs in this country would be immersed in a culture of violence. Something that does not exist in Japan.
When was the last time Japan invaded a country over economic interests (and rewarded for it)?
People also think a game that allows - taking a rocket launcher and shooting someone in the face is 'fun' - taking a broadsword and hacking off an opponents arm is 'fun'. - driving at triple digits on public roads is 'fun'. - building a rollercoaster that is designed to crash is 'fun'. - having a giant ape throw boulders at you is 'fun'.
Games are escapism. Deal with it.
Funny, I don't do any of t those things. I personally think that taking a rocket launcher and shooting someone it the face is pretty sick, same with a broadsword, etc. (or pretending to do so).
But hey, I guess most people have a bigger beef with my "escapism" at this time vs. pretending to kill people -- I get high.
But hey, getting high is similar to this lawsuit. After all, getting high makes people lazy with the exception of having excess energy to commit other interesting crimes like rape, murder, and theft. Being that video games now make people do some of the same things, I guess they will be illegal soon too.
Soo.. you're saying that we should stop prosecuting crimes, and abolish the criminal judicial system entirely, right?
No, quite to the contrary. We should increase our efforts in defining and prosecuting crimes.
Take a look at the data from 1998:
percentage of population in jail 0.2 (592,462) percentage of population in prison 0.5 (3,417,613) percentage of population on probation 1.3 (1,240,659) percentage of population on parole 0.3 (694,787)
percentage of population in the system 2.2
population in 1998 271,464,000
It should be clear that in order to have a good society, it requires much more than 2.2% of that population to either be incarcerated or closely monitored and controlled by the government right?
That is what every other society in the world has done up to now, right?
Yeah, the list of things that you "volunteer" for in order to be released under probation are getting longer and more stringent to the point that its almost impossible not to get caught in violation of the terms of your probation, its even worse with parole.
I personally believe that these conditions put on probation/parole people are a violation of due process and the 4th amendment. Its convenient that you don't even have to be convicted or even arrested of a crime. Meaning, _any_ "illegal" activity is automatically a violation of parole/probation and an automatic reconviction of your original crime without an arrest or trial.
The reason my lawyer gives for these rules are "To fuck with you". Sounds reasonable to me.
Well, just to set the record straight, not too long ago it was illegal for certain citizens of the United States to be in particular places or even a little further back in history it was legal to enslave people.
In other words, the law is not some kind of absolute thing handed down from some all knowing being. Its an arbitrary and often contradictory temporary piece of history made up by predominately old, ugly, white guys who haven't had a real job in at least 10 to 20 years.
Also take into account that people in the US can be incarcerated without being charged with a crime and without legal representation, I think its more appropriate to put GPS units on those that "have nothing to hide" instead thankyouverymuch.
I guess your not familiar with Oracle licenses? They do charge by clock rate and a different rate depending on the type of processor. If its a regular x86 proc the multiplier is 1x, if its something like a RISC chip, its 2x the clock rate.
It is about using proper and meaningfull terminology and avoid very strange conclusions and argumentations. Of course, we can all just not care and call every illegal activity "murder" and not have to bother about it. Anything that can in the most remote way be turned into something similar to murder would then by the same logic used in most "copyright infringement is theft" argumentations be completely as illegal as real murder and hence illegal.
I hope you are never a victim of identity infringement or whatever you want to call it. You could spend the rest of your living days trying to find the word for what your talking about.
Publishers of banned books make plenty of money off of the other 99.99% of their books.
- A library that contains books on how to pick locks
a) Picking locks is not illegal b) No single company or organization or group is negatively affected by lock picking or books containing lock picking information.
Record companies make money off of the distribution of their product. They don't care about music or musicians. They are simply a middleman. All they care about is that you give them money for the distribution of music.
You see, the sad thing is that it does not cost much money to make an album. I know people that have done it, and I'm sure you do too. Now that we have the internet, we are happy to share and pay ourselves via bandwidth costs to distribute music. These "service" companies need to realize this and try providing a better service.
Right now I have a DVR and hundreds or so channels of info available via cable TV. Its so much, that if I were interested in archiving it, I simply could not. Its that much data available. And I pay monthly to have a service, and don't feel the need waste my time to download movies or TV shows off the internet even though I have a broadband connection and a computer that I can hook up to my HDTV. The quality and convenience of cable and my DVR is so great, its not worth it.
It's copyright infringement, not theft for fuck's sake!
What is your point or motivation behind this? As it stands now in the US, copyright infringement is a more serious crime than theft. So what gives in the eternal copyright infringement vs theft debate?
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you are right. Who would want to use an IBM powerpc processor anyway?
get dumped :)
Gotta love it.
I have seen a number of IBM shops, none of them use Websphere. Is it really just a coincidence.
Having worked with websphere, I would say no, its not a coincidence.
Although this was 5 years ago.
I don't get the plasm hype aside from the gee wiz factor because someone actually dropped all that cash for one.
If you need a thin TV go with LCD or DLP. Plasmas are heavy as hell, typically have lower resolution, and they burn in (I've heard that this is a myth, and I've heard that its true).
I've got a 46" HDTV RPTV, and the picture is amazing. It has better resolution than both models of these Dells.
Actually gadget comes from a guy's name, Gaget, who made little Statue of Liberty statues that eventually got called "gadgets". http://www.damienb.com/english/liberty.html
FWIW, "a device that is very useful for a particular job" is not an adequate definition of a gadget. Gadgets, in my opinion, are not by definition useful, but rather a small manmade gizmo that is a novelty. It may or may not be that useful. How useful are many of the items on the list today?
All in all, we'll be able to do less with our current (i.e., digital) equipment than we could do with equivalent equipment (i.e., the VCR) 30 years ago.
Gotta call you out on this one. Even if my 30 year old VCR had better picture and sound quality than my cable provided DVR, I would use the DVR. Why?
1) it labels the recordings for me
2) search forward/reverse is better
3) no tapes
4) recording a particular program is trivial
5) recording a particular program _every time it comes on_ is trivial
When I was a kid, I was the only person in the household that could program the VCR to record something, and even then I rarely did it.
Now, I record stuff for the hell of it.
What I wish the DVR had (that the VCR doesn't either) is I wish the firewire port was worth using. By that, I wish I could suck any recorded program off of the device onto my computer at something near firewire speeds. I was excited about the firewire port at first, but then I realized that it only spit out the currently viewed program in realtime and that it might be encrypted. Well, needless to say, I never wasted my time buying a firewire cable for it. I mean if I could "cron" my DVR to play something at a particular time and have my computer capture it at that time, I would not mind terribly much, but I am not going to sit and wait to record something in realtime, especially since I do not know if its going to be encrypted or not.
For most content, I could care about archiving it for personal use. Most everything on TV is rebroadcasted so many times that its nearly impossible to miss something. However, there are some programs I would like to have archived. I guess I'll start using those TV torrent sites for those. Hell, I already pay my cable company for my internet and cable, why should they care where I get recordings of their programming?
Why do advertisers/companies think that annoying the hell out of people is a good way to make money?????
Being that "people" are not the customers of advertisers or companies that are paid via advertising, I guess that annoying people is immaterial to their business.
I eventually tracked it down to either Flash or Java objects loaded into a page that requested a window be opened.
Another reason I haven't noticed the new popup phenomenon. I don't browse with flash or java.
Should anybody?
It's really annoying when you have two different java ads playing some sound. But here you are trying to read a page, and unless you turn your speakers off or something, you have an engine or something running.
Hmm, is there some compelling reason that you enable java and flash in order to see ads?
I find it a much better browsing experience to browse by default w/o java or plugins. No annoying flash ads or java ads, and when I come up on a web page that is blank (usually a flash only site), I either leave, enable plugins temporarily, or use another browser temporarily. Actually, its probably closest to 50% immediately leave, 25% for the other two options if I'm morbidly curious. Then, its still 50/50 if I stay or go. Usually the eyecandy and annoying wait times for the flash to load and the repetitive sounds and music drive me off.
I will say this to the end of time. If your website requires some 3rd party plugin that is necessary to view that website, your website is broken and should be distributed on CD via snailmail or something if you want me to run an application.
Currently, its _only_ the flash plugin that seems most "required" to view browser applications, but just wait until the resurgence of the plugin craze where every website requires a special 3rd party plugin to view their site. To me its a slippery slope that I would not care to go down again.
"It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax."
So that is why there are all of those cigarettes thrown on the side of the roads from Ohio and Indiana into Michigan.
Seriously, cigarette taxes are a scam and its common to buy them from a neighboring city or state to pay fewer taxes. Its at least 50c a pack cheaper to not buy them from the city I live in.
when the press spouts statistics without any reference as to how the data was collected..
Its not that bad, it only happens 28.7% of the time.
I, too, would like to see a more involved, academic analysis of the security of each platform. But even as a quick quantitative analysis, this technique for deciding how secure a system is falls on its face.
Isn't the post hoc data from the past 10 years sufficient?
Legalizing drugs will not fix our problems, any more than legalizing alcohol did.
http://drugwarfacts.org/crime.htm
If I said the President of the United States taught me that solving problems with violence was appropriate, which is why I shot my next door neighbor, I'd be called a lunatic. But if I say video games made me do it, I'm just a victim?
Violence in video games are not real. The violence that the President of the United States does on a daily basis is.
So yeah, your a lunatic if you think that President has anything to do with citizen's violent behavior instead of video games.
Some countries make the person that initiated the lawsuit pay the person they are suing's legal expenses if they loose. Kinda ups the ante now doesn't it?
The problem here is at least three fold.
1. Questionable Parenting.
2. Culture of violence.
3. Easy access to high level weapons.
It probably has some to do with all three. But if anyone growing up and watching the standard news programs in this country would be immersed in a culture of violence. Something that does not exist in Japan.
When was the last time Japan invaded a country over economic interests (and rewarded for it)?
People also think a game that allows
- taking a rocket launcher and shooting someone in the face is 'fun'
- taking a broadsword and hacking off an opponents arm is 'fun'.
- driving at triple digits on public roads is 'fun'.
- building a rollercoaster that is designed to crash is 'fun'.
- having a giant ape throw boulders at you is 'fun'.
Games are escapism. Deal with it.
Funny, I don't do any of t those things. I personally think that taking a rocket launcher and shooting someone it the face is pretty sick, same with a broadsword, etc. (or pretending to do so).
But hey, I guess most people have a bigger beef with my "escapism" at this time vs. pretending to kill people -- I get high.
But hey, getting high is similar to this lawsuit. After all, getting high makes people lazy with the exception of having excess energy to commit other interesting crimes like rape, murder, and theft. Being that video games now make people do some of the same things, I guess they will be illegal soon too.
Soo.. you're saying that we should stop prosecuting crimes, and abolish the criminal judicial system entirely, right?
No, quite to the contrary. We should increase our efforts in defining and prosecuting crimes.
Take a look at the data from 1998:
percentage of population in jail 0.2 (592,462)
percentage of population in prison 0.5 (3,417,613)
percentage of population on probation 1.3 (1,240,659)
percentage of population on parole 0.3 (694,787)
percentage of population in the system 2.2
population in 1998 271,464,000
It should be clear that in order to have a good society, it requires much more than 2.2% of that population to either be incarcerated or closely monitored and controlled by the government right?
That is what every other society in the world has done up to now, right?
In this instance I don't believe that tracking cons is really a violation of anyones rights.
How does the saying go? Treat someone like a child, they will act like a child.
So, I guess treating someone like a criminal will surely make them a good citizen.
Sounds better than going to jail!
Yeah, the list of things that you "volunteer" for in order to be released under probation are getting longer and more stringent to the point that its almost impossible not to get caught in violation of the terms of your probation, its even worse with parole.
I personally believe that these conditions put on probation/parole people are a violation of due process and the 4th amendment. Its convenient that you don't even have to be convicted or even arrested of a crime. Meaning, _any_ "illegal" activity is automatically a violation of parole/probation and an automatic reconviction of your original crime without an arrest or trial.
The reason my lawyer gives for these rules are "To fuck with you". Sounds reasonable to me.
when one choses to break the law
I assume you meant chooses?
Well, just to set the record straight, not too long ago it was illegal for certain citizens of the United States to be in particular places or even a little further back in history it was legal to enslave people.
In other words, the law is not some kind of absolute thing handed down from some all knowing being. Its an arbitrary and often contradictory temporary piece of history made up by predominately old, ugly, white guys who haven't had a real job in at least 10 to 20 years.
Also take into account that people in the US can be incarcerated without being charged with a crime and without legal representation, I think its more appropriate to put GPS units on those that "have nothing to hide" instead thankyouverymuch.
so why not charge based on clock rate?
I guess your not familiar with Oracle licenses? They do charge by clock rate and a different rate depending on the type of processor. If its a regular x86 proc the multiplier is 1x, if its something like a RISC chip, its 2x the clock rate.
It is about using proper and meaningfull terminology and avoid very strange conclusions and argumentations. Of course, we can all just not care and call every illegal activity "murder" and not have to bother about it. Anything that can in the most remote way be turned into something similar to murder would then by the same logic used in most "copyright infringement is theft" argumentations be completely as illegal as real murder and hence illegal.
I hope you are never a victim of identity infringement or whatever you want to call it. You could spend the rest of your living days trying to find the word for what your talking about.
How is this different from...?
- Hosting a list of banned books
Publishers of banned books make plenty of money off of the other 99.99% of their books.
- A library that contains books on how to pick locks
a) Picking locks is not illegal b) No single company or organization or group is negatively affected by lock picking or books containing lock picking information.
Record companies make money off of the distribution of their product. They don't care about music or musicians. They are simply a middleman. All they care about is that you give them money for the distribution of music.
You see, the sad thing is that it does not cost much money to make an album. I know people that have done it, and I'm sure you do too. Now that we have the internet, we are happy to share and pay ourselves via bandwidth costs to distribute music. These "service" companies need to realize this and try providing a better service.
Right now I have a DVR and hundreds or so channels of info available via cable TV. Its so much, that if I were interested in archiving it, I simply could not. Its that much data available. And I pay monthly to have a service, and don't feel the need waste my time to download movies or TV shows off the internet even though I have a broadband connection and a computer that I can hook up to my HDTV. The quality and convenience of cable and my DVR is so great, its not worth it.
Dunno why music can't be this way.
It's copyright infringement, not theft for fuck's sake!
5 4258&tid=155&tid=133
What is your point or motivation behind this? As it stands now in the US, copyright infringement is a more serious crime than theft. So what gives in the eternal copyright infringement vs theft debate?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/1